


For The Temples Of Her Gods

by paperdragon



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Retelling, pre-got
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-20 00:18:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2408210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperdragon/pseuds/paperdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is Rhaella of the House Targaryen, The First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, and this is her story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For The Temples Of Her Gods

**Author's Note:**

> This story may contain lots of tiny little changes to the original history of Game Of Thrones. Also contains vivid descriptions of rape/non-consensual sex, violence, triggers. So, yeah, there you go. Also, I don't own anything other than what I write. All characters ,except a few minor ones that I add, belong to George R.R Martin. Have fun reading kiddos. 
> 
> Oh yeah, this is gloriously unbeta'd. I don't really have a beta- so...any mistakes are mine.

**i.**   _ **unum**_

_**.** _

Rhaella is born in the evening, cropped crown of silver hair and all, and her mother takes her in her arms, exhausted yet still. She opens her eyes, violet and headstrong, throws her head back and cries, shrill and piercing, still a child. Her mother sets her head against the wooden board of the bed, sweat covering her body, hair plastered to her face and neck, ignores her child’s tears as the flow down new skin, instead focuses on the slick blood marking her thighs and her cunt, murmurs, ‘ _Rhaella’,_ almost cries herself before handing the child back to the wet nurse.

The nurse takes her to the nursery, cleanses her body, soft touch with a soft cloth on baby skin and picks her up when she still doesn’t stop crying and says ‘ _best save those tears child; you have a long life where you shall need them_ ’.  Ignoring the nurse as well, Rhaella stops crying after a very long time.

**.**

**ii.** _**dva** _

.

Her father always kept looking at her in a way she’d seen him look at mother and she kept ignoring it, choosing small corners she could hide in better than sitting in one place.

Five years old, she wanders the Red Keep, smiling at the servants and knights that litter the hallway, and she finds her brother somewhere down near the dungeons, where all the dragon skulls are, and she’s excited, but scared too.

“What are you doing here, sister?” Her elder and only brother asks, and she forgets her words for a moment, before remembering them yet again.

“I- I was playing.” She says, suddenly lowers down her voice because it’s too loud underground and she feels very small here.

“With the dragon skulls?” Aerys asks, and she doesn’t know what to say because she hasn’t talked to her brother much, only sat by his side at a few dinners and smiled at him when they’re with their mother, but she only knows him as well as she does her septa.  “Aren’t you afraid of them? You are still a child.”

She bristles, annoyed, puts her head up like she’s seen mother do and widens her eyes like she’s seen father. Her brother is only a few years older than her, only three. “So are you. I’m not afraid of them, they’re dead.” She says, he laughs, small and brave, and she’s shocked, angry, too. “Are you laughing at me? Stop it. Stop laughing at me!” She tells him, chin back down. Aerys chuckles and she frowns, trying to keep the fit locked inside her, the one that will make her so angry she’ll start crying and hitting the soles of her feet against the dirt floor. 

“I am not laughing at you.” He says, “Alright, mayhaps I am.  But I am laughing at the sister I never knew I had.”  She doesn’t know what to say to that, doesn’t understand it, doesn’t read like her brother does, constantly and whenever he is free. She reads whenever she wants to, which is whenever she’s tired and doesn’t want to sleep.

So she frowns instead, her brow furrowing and pale lips turning. “What are _you_ doing here?”

“I come here when I want to think.” He tells her, and she doesn’t understand what that means, can’t understand.

“You can think in your chambers.” She says, confused, lilac eyes filled with the utmost sincerity Aerys will crave for someday.

“I like thinking _here._ ” He counters, as best as an eight year old can.

She doesn’t know what to answer, hasn’t been taught what to say to that by her septa so she simply says what comes to her mind. “Well, what are you thinking about?”

“Fire.” He tells her, and he has that look in his eyes, one she’s never seen anywhere on anyone, and again her mind is blank. She is not sure of what she looks like trying to think, but her brother’s eyes change, suddenly and he calls to her.

“Come sit down next to me, Rhaella.” He says, and he seems a bit like their mother, so she does, sits down next to him and quietly observes.

He has a box in his hand, but she’s not interested in the box, she’s interested in him, her brother, the one who shares her flesh and blood. She looks closely, doesn’t even blink, not once, runs her eyes over his own eyes, just a little darker than her own, the pale skin she’s seen on her father’s face as well, almost touches the silver hair that crowns her own head as well, marks the similarities she shares with her brother and almost doesn’t even notice that his attention is no longer at the box, but instead at her.

“Why are you staring at me? Is there something on my face?” He asks, and she doesn’t know why she’s suddenly feeling the need to shy away. He’s _beautiful_ , not in the way her mother calls her but in the way one of her maids called _her_ a few weeks ago, with that small gasp and shortness of breath, with wonder dissolved in it and just the smallest amount of envy laced into it.

“No. There’s nothing there that doesn’t need to be.” She tells him in return and he narrows his eyes, as if he knows that she knows something she’s not supposed to, but she really doesn’t.

“You’re smart for a girl of five.” He tells her, and maybe it’s true, but it is the best words to come out of her brother’s mouth, filled with the blind sincerity and truthfulness only children can manage, and she smiles as brightly and as widely as she can.

“And you are not too silly for a boy of eight.” She jests, smallest of laughter in her voice, though he hears it all the same, huffs like a child would, full of admiration and naivety.  

“Well, do go to your lesson, sister. Your septa won’t be happy seeing the princess being late.” He tells her, and her face betrays her surprise- she barely knows anything about her brother and yet he knows when he has her lesson.

“I’ll tell her the prince stopped me. What can she say to that?” Many things, because her septa was a family favorite, and her mother favored her above any who tried to come.

Aerys smiles, she quite likes it, the small tilt of his mouth. _He looks like a God_ , she thinks, _all perfect_. He should have a statue, she thinks, her own hair tight in braids and impeccably styled in a way she cannot follow. He should have a statue, a painting of himself _just like this_ because he looks beautiful in a way she’s never seen before, he looks like one of the statues in the sept, but all of them are frowning and her brother is smiling and she is sure he would light up the entire sept. _If he is a God,_ she wondered, _am I a Goddess?_

“She would say that unless the prince was dying and you were busy saving his life, nothing other than that can be more important than your lesson. Then she would tell father and I would be in for quite a difficulty, would I not, sweet sister?” Her brother says it all in a way a grown man recounts a tale of his childhood, wrapped in the woolen blanket of amusement and nostalgia.

Rhaella makes a face, what kind, she does not know but it is enough to make Aerys laugh again. She hits him with five year old fists and no true anger. “Stop laughing at me! It’s not very princely of you to laugh at your sister.”

He only laughs louder. “No, but it is very brotherly of me to laugh at my sister.” He says, and she turns away, as offended as a child can be. He most likely knows this, and says, “Go on sister, leave me to my thinking. We both have things to do.”

She turns back to him, the farce of being slighted forgotten. “Can’t I stay with you? Just this once. I promise to be very quite. I won’t talk or anything. You won’t even know I’m here.” She says, and he looks like he is thinking about it. “Please, brother? I do not want to learn about anymore dead kings then I already have.”

“You’ll have to learn about them someday, nevertheless.” He says, and she doesn’t see the underlying meaning until she does.

“You mean I can stay? Tell me I can stay. Just this once, and then you can go back to thinking with the dragon bones.” She says, wanting to hear the words out of his mouth.

He smiles, small and perfect, godlike in his glory yet again. “Yes sister, you can stay.”

It is one of the biggest kindness Aerys will ever show her.  

.

 **iii. _tři_**  

.

She stands in front of the mirror, dolled up and extravagant. Her hair has been curled, her handmaids made up her stay up till midnight and till her back ached like she’d helped in lifting water buckets down in the stables. They’d wrapped silver locks round and round over pieces of metal until her scalp pained and she couldn’t help but wince while turning in bed. And now here she is again, the best silk they could find in the seven kingdoms turned into a gown, a curdling blood red that went darker and darker downwards until it reached the end where there was nothing but an abyss of black. They put slippers on her feet, perfect and hand sewn, three braids from the start of her hair tied together as one in the end, the rest free falling around her like a banner in the wind.

 _You are very lucky, Princess Rhaella. Very few are given such an honor._ One of her handmaids says, and Rhaella does not answer because she does not feel lucky. She feels tired. She feels sore and pained and ten and one and she wants nothing more than to go to sleep. _Why did they give me a bed of the best kind if they will not allow me rest?_ She thinks, blowing an idle ringlet off her cheek.

She’s not a woman yet, and unlike most, she does not want to be because she’s seen what girls become when they become women- they have to sew and talk and have a brood of children and follow their husbands’ orders and put their womanly duties first and she cannot, for the life of herself, understand why anyone in the world would ever want to be bound in such a way.

Her thoughts are shattered again, lost somewhere in the corners of her mind as her handmaids finally leave her and she almost tips over, body feeling betrayed of being so quickly deprived of support. Her hand reaches out and clutches the wooden table littered with pins.

She notices her usual chain of gold lying carelessly along the edge of the dresser and she reaches a hand out to pick it up again, place it around her neck and feel the comforting familiarity resting in the hollow of her neck, but Helena, her youngest handmaiden, stops hers. It is time, she realizes, to meet her ladies in waiting for the very first time.

She doesn’t feel excited or happy- only nervous because they will not know her, who she is and what she’ll like- they’ll only know her by her name, by her family and by her blood and for a moment she tries to imagine what it would feel like to be sent away from home at ten and one to serve a high -end princess. Rhaella would hate it, she would- so why wouldn’t they? They’d act nice and polite and kind but at her back they’d wish for home, for their siblings and parents and they wouldn’t want to be _here._   

Rhaella swallows down the nervousness pitted against her throat, restricting her breath. _They’re only girls, like me._ She thinks, _It may be good to have someone other than my handmaids._ She raises her head, up until she can barely see the ground, takes a deep breath and puts on her best noble face as the door opens to reveal three girls, almost each close to her age.

They look…scared and excited, dejected and annoyed, and Rhaella suddenly wants to go sit near the dragon skulls with her brother to _think_ and then stay there _forever_.

She tries to look more welcoming, gives up, and moves towards them with grace befitting a queen, yet dreaming of fire.      

 

 

                                                                                                                  

**Author's Note:**

> Alrighty, so, this is actually pretty damn small because, well, I have ten other half-written fanfictions that need to be completed, and also, I've got so much damn school work. Like wow. I'll try to update, but no promises. Hopefully one more chapter in this week, though. I was actually pretty nervous about publishing this thing, I don't really know why, but I just wasn't getting a particular feel from it. As always, I'd love to know what you guys thought about it, and if there's anything I could improve. 
> 
> \- Ann


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